Gravity

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Year:	2013
Country of origin:	USA
Director:	Alfonso Cuarón
Genre:	Sci-fi thriller
Starring:	Sandra Bullock, George Clooney
Rating:	5/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454468/
Tagline:	Don't Let Go
Favourite line:	"I hate space!"

Garnering more positive buzz than an electrically charged nest of hornets, Alfonso Cuarón's stripped down sci-fi-thrama could only ever be a disappointment.
Right?

The plot:
A team of American astronauts working to service the Hubble space telescope are imperilled when, thousands of miles from their position in orbit, a Russian satellite is decommissioned. See, those crazy Russians, instead of just letting their obsolete space tech float around like their American, Chinese and Indian cousins choose to, opt instead to blow them out of the sky using missiles.
Really Big Missiles.
Mid way through a repair sequence, mission commander Kowalski (Clooney) receives directives that the debris from the detonation could be a threat, so instructs Stone (Bullock) to cancel the repair work and head back to the shuttle. Before they can get there, the debris field hits, knocking out vital equipment and killing their two fellow astronauts, a piece of debris quite literally tearing the features off one unfortunate individual.
Alone, out of contact with Houston Control back on Earth, and with oxygen running low, the pair must make extraordinary decisions to try to ensure their survival.

A true two-hander, the only faces you see throughout are that of Clooney and Bullock, this clocks in at a refreshingly trim ninety minutes, servicing the stripped down plotline admirably, leaving little time for extraneous guff and nonsense.
A near seamless blend of CGI and live action work, this is purported to have taken six years plus in development, director Cuarón compelled to wait for technology to catch up with his vision, and indeed to himself facilitate new methods of movie-making in order to realise the images and sequences he imagined.
Clooney and Bullock are immensely likeable leads, Sandra in particular, carrying the film as she does with not a whiff of a struggle, each second she is on screen - which is most of them - infused with the easy confidence that comes after so many years at the top of her game.
Neatly side-stepping any accusations of 'mainstreamism' or selling out due to casting decisions, Cuarón instead fashions a compellingly straight forward narrative which showcases cinema at the very height of it's power. Right from the off, we are greeted with astonishing directorial technique, an initial tracking shot that lasts well over ten minutes, establishing characters and settings in a way so imaginative it damn near blows the mind. But this is no style over substance, every second of the motion calculated to maximise sensory input, informing the viewer of who is where, doing what and why; an artisan educating as he crafts.
With stylistic nods to such majestic fare as 2001, Silent Running and even Carpenter's debut offering Dark Star, this is a science fiction movie that easily transcends such simplistic genre labelling, instead straddling the line somewhere between existential space drama and humanistic survivalism, bringing to mind films as diverse as Buried, Black Hole and The Road.
A film that simply must be seen on as big a screen as is obtainable, it is just possible that space-bound movies may never quite be the same again.
Extraordinary.